The present invention relates to the field of user interfaces for portable electronic devices, and more particularly to a system, method and apparatus for sensing and interpreting finger gestures and movements to control and provide input to electronic devices.
Portable electronic devices have become increasingly popular. Examples of these devices include wireless or cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), pagers and audio or music delivery devices. Some devices have become increasingly small such that they are now deemed “pocketable” and/or “wearable.”
A portable electronic device typically has a user interface for operative control. Most if not all conventional user interfaces for such portable electronic devices employ physical buttons, stylus, or voice control. In some devices, a large number of operations or functions are possible with the user interface.
One major shortcoming of these prior art user interfaces is that the user must physically retrieve and position the portable electronic device appropriately for physical contact therewith, for example, by utilizing a stylus to provide commands upon a touch sensitive screen of a PDA or by manually depressing function buttons on a portable media player. In addition, as the size of a device becomes smaller, the interface becomes increasingly inappropriate from an ergonomic standpoint. Voice controlled systems may alleviate some of these problems, however, the major shortcoming of a voice-controlled interface is that the user must speak openly in such a way that other nearby people may hear. Many voice controlled systems are also extremely sensitive to environmental noise and interference.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a system, method and apparatus for improving the shortcomings of prior art electronic device control systems.